Intel’s Battlemage might beat Nvidia and AMD to the punch

2 weeks ago 2

Intel Arc A770 GPU installed in a test bench.

Out of all the GPU news we’ve been getting in the last few weeks, information about Intel Arc Battlemage has been pretty scarce — but it appears that Intel might still surprise us. According to a new leak, Intel’s next-gen desktop GPUs might join the ranks of the best graphics cards as early as next month. Launching in December would certainly give Intel an unexpected edge over AMD and Nvidia, and it’s an edge that it could really use right now.

As always with these types of leaks, we’re working with a vague message and reading into it to figure out what’s going on. In this instance, the gossip comes from Golden Pig Upgrade Pack on Weibo, a user with a pretty good reputation.

The leaker shared that they were “looking forward to the wonderful performance of Battlemage next month.” There’s also a clarification in there that adds that they’re talking about the desktop version, which is important, as Battlemage architecture has already made an appearance in Intel’s Lunar Lake processors. This time, we’re talking about the desktop versions, and Intel has been pretty quiet where those are concerned.

Golden Pig Upgrade on Weibo, talking about Battlemage.

Two key takeaways from that cryptic message are that Intel might launch Battlemage in December — which is a whole lot sooner than expected at this point — and that these GPUs will offer “wonderful performance.” Let’s unpack both claims.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming

For starters, the release date for Battlemage has been uncertain until now. Early this year, Intel’s Tom Petersen said he hoped we might hear more about Battlemage before CES 2025. However, after a quiet year with few updates, leakers adjusted their expectations for all three GPU manufacturers. Nvidia and AMD are now both said to launch their next-gen RTX 50-series and RDNA 4 graphics cards at CES 2025 in January, and most leakers expected Intel to do the same.

If Intel manages to surprise us all and release Battlemage in December, it’ll be good news all around for Team Blue. For starters, when faced with next-gen competition, Battlemage might struggle to compete, but against current-gen counterparts, the difference won’t be as big. The holiday season is also a good time to sell new graphics cards, so if Intel can snag some of those sales, that’d give Battlemage an early boost.

The performance claim is just as interesting to me as the release date speculation. For months, leakers have been indicating that Intel might be aiming for the mainstream segment with Battlemage, and that the most high-end version of the GPU has been canceled. A recent benchmark showed an unnamed Battlemage GPU with just 20 Xe cores, which is lower than the last-gen flagship Arc A770. Will Intel deliver more competitive performance with Battlemage after all?

Remember not to take any of the above at face value, as all of this is just speculation until Intel announces Battlemage. However, if the leak proves to be true, Intel might get a chance to launch its next-gen cards a month or two before AMD and Nvidia.

Monica J. White

Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…

Everything you need to know about buying a GPU in 2024

RTX 4090.

The graphics card, also known as the GPU, is arguably one of the most exciting components in any PC build. Alongside the processor, your graphics card often has the greatest impact on the overall performance of your PC. That makes it a pretty high-stakes purchase, especially if you consider that GPUs can get pretty expensive.

The GPU market has a lot to offer, and that's regardless of your needs and your budget. Whether you're aiming for something super cheap to support some light browsing or a behemoth to handle the most GPU-intensive games, you have lots of options. In this guide, we'll show you what to look out for so that you can pick the best GPU that fits your budget and needs.
Nvidia, AMD, or Intel?
Consumer graphics cards are generally split into two categories -- integrated and discrete graphics. Since you're here, you're most likely looking for a discrete (or dedicated) GPU, and that's what we're going to focus on in this article.

Intel’s next laptop chips may have a secret weapon

Intel Core Ultra Series 2 Lunar Lake chipset.

An upcoming Intel graphics solution, namely the Intel Arc 140T, has recently been spotted on GFXBench. The most interesting bit is that it offers a noticeable performance advantage over the Xe2-based Arc 140V iGPU that recently made its appearance on Intel’s latest Lunar Lake mobile CPUs.

A post by X (formerly Twitter) user Michael (@miktdt) compares GFXbench scores of the Arc 140T with two Arc 140V SKUs—one with 16GB memory and the other with 8GB. The 8GB Arc 140V reached 6,613 frames with an average of 106.7 framers per second (fps), while the 16GB version achieved 6,839 frames at 110.3 fps. However, the Intel Arc 140T, equipped with 16GB of memory, excelled with 11,056 frames at an average of 178.3 fps, surpassing the 16GB Arc 140V by 62%, despite both GPUs sharing eight Xe cores.

Intel Arc Battlemage finally shows signs of life

The Intel logo on the Arc A770 graphics card.

In the last few weeks, we've been bombarded with reports regarding Nvidia's upcoming top graphics cards, but leakers have all been silent about Intel Arc Battlemage. Today, however, we saw signs of life straight from the source as Intel has included Battlemage graphics cards in its new media drivers.

As spotted by VideoCardz, Intel added BMG -- the shortcut for Battlemage -- to its latest round of drivers on GitHub. This covers an addition to the open-source media driver for the video acceleration API (VAAPI), which includes various codecs for video decoding and encoding. The column labeled as BMG looks pretty bare, though, with zero encoding support so far.

Read Entire Article